News

While we have our cluster setup looked in to we’ve been busy looking in to some other areas of the site we’d like to improve before we “centralise” the Nexus in to supporting mods for all games.

We’ve come up with a new file adding wizard that’s usable on all sites. Indeed, when we finally get around to centralising our database you’ll be able to add a mod for any game ever made to the site through this one file wizard, but for now it’s setup to work with the sites and games we already support. The idea is that the new file wizard will take you, step-by-step, through the process of making a complete file page for your files. While in the past you would simply add a few details and then be expected to add things in later, now you’re taken through every step of the process, with 9 steps in total.

You can skip steps that you don’t want or don’t need to do (like required files), or skip the wizard entirely if you so wish, but I’m hoping that this new process will at least introduce new mod authors to all the file page features we currently support so they can provide as much relevant information to their users right from the start while also providing veteran mod authors of the site with a quicker way of get their pages set up on the site without having to keep going backwards and forwards.

We’ve also added a new set of options to the wizard that allow you to better categorise your files. It actually makes use of our tags system, but in a much more obvious manner, in an attempt to better support our content blocking system, which I’ll now discuss.

Recently we had a couple of nude mods show up in our hot files on Skyrim Nexus. It’s not a particularly rare occurrence by any stretch of the imagination, but what was a bit more rare was the content of one of the mods. A penis. EEK, A PENIS! Lets get this out the way. Please repeat after me: penis penis penis, vagina vagina vagina. Got that out your system? Good. While we get the occasional rant about big boob mods or general female nudity on the sites, nothing sparks an absolute outpouring of pent up closet-case emotion like the showcasing of a penis mod on the site. Indeed, no less than 6 people sent me a message to inform me of their outrage of bearing witness to a penis mod on the sites. When pressed for clarification on why vagina mods were ok but penis mods weren’t the conversation went ominously silent. While I’m no expert in the field let me provide some advice: if seeing a penis mod throws you into a fit of quizzical fury you might need to explore your own sexuality a bit further. Don’t repress it, explore it. You’ll save yourself lots of therapy payments in the future.

With that said, I can completely understand why you might not be interested in seeing a penis, or a vagina, or boobs, or scantily clad men or women, or translations, or lore-breaking files, or save-games or any number of various types of content (indeed, the issue isn’t in not wanting to see the content but the way in which people get so comically worked up over the issue). While we can’t provide a 100% success rate method of removing this content from your viewing we can try our hardest to tailor the mods you see to your specific preferences.

We’ve had content blocking available for a long time. It works by blocking files that have been tagged with specific tags. If you block the “Sexy/skimpy” tag you won’t see any mods that are using that tag. There are a few pages that are the exception to that rule, the hot files originally didn’t block this content but it now does (we fixed it recently) and the new today/new recently pages don’t. However, the category results/search result pages will block this content. We even go one step further and tell you that you’re currently blocking content and you’re only seeing X number of files as Y number of files have been blocked from your viewing, with an easy link to see the results with your previously blocked content showing as well. The systems are in place, you just need to use them.

There are two inherent problems; (1) not enough mod authors tag their files and (2) people complain about files not being tagged but then don’t tag files themselves. Your profiles have a statistic on them called “Files tagged”. It tells people how many files you’ve successfully tagged. If you complain about files not being tagged properly and your “Files tagged” statistic is 0, you’re a part of the problem and not a part of the solution. Your complaining about the lack of tagging doesn’t fix the issue, your actual tagging of files does. So next time you see a nude mod that hasn’t been tagged properly, “doing the right thing” isn’t complaining about it, doing the right thing is actually tagging the file yourself so that others don’t have the same problem you did.

With that said we’re trying to do our part to make these features more prominent. In the new file adding wizard we’ve hand-picked some tagging selections that are known to be the most regularly blocked tags on the sites. You’re asked “Tick any of the boxes that apply to your file. My file...” and on Skyrim Nexus, for example, options include “contains nudity”, “contains sexy/skimpy outfits”, “is a translation”, “is for male characters”, “is for female characters” and so on. (Note: as of writing I haven’t actually gone around and added these, but they’ll be up within an hour of me posting this article). Ticking these boxes will automatically tag your file with the relevant tag.

On the user end, we’ve added these same tags to the file search page under “Attributes”. Each tag is given a tick box. If the tag is ticked then you’ll see files using that tag. If you untick the box you will no longer see files using that tag. It works exactly the same as our content blocking system but it’s just much more obvious, and provides a link to the full range of tags you can block on the sites.

The aim is to make content blocking both more relevant, by asking direct questions about the type of content your mod contains, and also more prominent, by making it a part of our extensive filtering system that should help you to drill-down in to the file database and discard the types of mods you would never be interested in anyway. While this system was always present on the site it was never this prominent.

You’ll also notice the new file wizard has some new options for categories. This is more of a precursor for our centralisation work as I think most of the sites are pretty set in their categories now, but I’ll quickly run through it. You now have three category options. You must pick from a pre-set list (as before) but you can also suggest your own category that you think would best suit your file, or you can select from a pre-set list of what others have suggested. What’s the point of this? With current sites there’s not too much of a point to it as there’s already plenty of usable and relevant categories, however if we start supporting new games we want to be as automated and flexible as possible. The idea is if you’ve got a texture replacer mod for a new game, you add the game yourself and the site will automatically setup the game site along with a “Miscellaneous” category (all games have that category in them, current and future). You select the “Miscellaneous” category for your file but you suggest a “Texture replacer” category. While the file will begin in the Miscellaneous category if an admin agrees with the suggested category any files uploaded to the “Miscellaneous” category but using that suggested category will then be moved over to this new suggested category. The suggested category becomes a new category in and of itself. It sounds complicated but it’s really not.

Alrighty, I’ve gone on long enough. I hope these new features can be put to good use and if you think something isn’t working properly then let me know.